October 31st is not a particularly special day in Amsterdam. Any of the individuals or clubs who would have been otherwise inclined to do something Halloweenish already got it out of their systems over the weekend, it seems. Even so, Halloween is just not that big of a deal here; it's more of an Anglo / American kind of thing. Honestly, I don't miss this particular holiday from my homeland all that much.

But I did notice some street cleaners at work this morning -- using witches' brooms.

It's not that Amsterdam's streetcleaners got these particular brooms out especially for this day of the year, though. It's simply what they use to do their work: long, brown, medium-stiff willow branches, bundled up at the end of a regular broom handle. They've always looked like "witches' brooms" to me, but I guess they're just the kind of tool that works best with getting leaves and cigarette butts and little pieces of litter out from the crevices in cobblestone streets and sidewalks. Or maybe they just like to do things the old way, here in the "Old World." In any event, these witches' brooms / streetcleaners' brooms are a fun little cultural artifact, from my vantage point.

On the other hand, I don't know what to think about the medieval sword that made its way into my kids' school this morning.

The sword was brought in to be a part of a costume -- but for a book report, not for Halloween. Elliot and two of his classmates were doing a presentation about a book called "De Grijze Jager" (which means "the Gray Hunter," though it is actually a translation of an English-language book called "The Ranger's Apprentice"), and they decided to dress up in medieval costume to make things more interesting. They wore hoods and capes. Elliot fashioned himself a crude bow and arrow from sticks and rubber bands. But Elliot's friend Gaitano brought a genuine, Medieval-style, large, heavy, steel sword. He carried it to school in a large hockey bag. And no one in the school seemed to think anything of it. There were no concerns about terrorism or school violence or anything like that (which is just as well since the sword certainly wasn't intended for any of those kinds of purposes). Still, to me a sword in school seemed like a recipe for injury, given the class that it was being introduced to a room full of 9- and 10-year-olds. I didn't know if I should say anything about it or not. The sword didn't seem to raise any eyebrows (at least not in the time that I was there at the school, dropping my kids off). So I just wrote it off as another cultural curiosity...

Still I wonder how I really should deal with things like this. After nine years of dealing with cross-cultural tensions, you'd think I'd have situations like this figured out. But I don't know. What's cultural, and what's common sense? What's funny, and what's fearful? I certainly don't know. It's just everyday life in Amsterdam.